One of my posts may have been artificially boosted as part of a smear campaign. A story about "crisis PR," fake numbers, fake jobs, and the consultant class.
I read the NYT article when it dropped, and my conclusion was the same: I will no longer trust anything that's trending online. However, hearing how many times it was reposted from different devices using just one email is facinating insight into how these PR firms pull this off. You can emulate computers and android phones easily and you can automate much of this. So while it technically might not be a bot posting all of this, one person could easily automate the creation of scores of virtual machines and virtual androids from different IP addresses to post the same content many times on a bunch of different social media sites in a very short amount of time.
I hope this article takes off, Vince, as you are the first content provider I've seen post about this with strong evidence that your content was used in the campaign.
Avenue 'Ben Houdaifa' is a road 0.21 km in length in Tanger-Tétouan, Morocco and 'ben' means 'son of' in arabic. Naturally this means the avenue in Morocco really liked your article and kept reading it hundreds of times a day.
My guard always goes up when "celebrity was rude in an interview/talking to a fan" is used as damning evidence - unless it's a pattern of behavior (J. LO), 99 times out of 100, the interviewer/fan was being rude or asking a stupid question.
I wound up watching It Ends With Us the day after Christmas, with subtitles, on my mother's slightly-motion-smoothed TV. I didn't hate it! An extremely 2024 movie in its aesthetics and song choices.
I know defending J. Lo on the internet is a fool's game, but I find a lot of the negative reports around her to be a bit suss (like the alleged lousy tipping stuff), and evidence of her actual crimes are always like, "she made a dodgy movie and had a tour bomb during a historically terrible year for touring music acts", compared to, say, male actors who have admitted drunken sexual harrassment (Affleck), have credible assault allegations (Depp), or were caught on camera verbally abusing someone for daring to walk in their sight line (Bale).
Basically I think her biggest crime appears to be taking herself very seriously, a la Streisand, and I love her whole camp AF shtick.
JLo is the real celebrity personality story of this year. To the Tastefully-Discerning-of-the-Chronically-Online (me), Blake Lively being snippy a few times took a backseat to JLo betting on herself to the tune of like $50 mil for the multimedia rollout of a new album for it to flop so hard it required armchair psychology
AND she found time in between the cancelled tour and the divorce and the Amazon docs to make Atlas, a Netflix movie I know I watched, but could not tell you a thing about (Simu Liu and Sterling K. Brown were in it?) What a year!
A lot of prominent or semi-prominent people online spend an extreme amount of time hand-wringing about their numbers or how their engagement works on each platform and it's pretty tedious. But this was actually interesting! Another worthwhile chapter for your book about the modern media landscape.
For what it's worth, I do feel like Twitter and Tiktok did turn on Blake Lively for a few months, but it all reset pretty quicky because that Justin Baldoni guy never shut the hell up. Guess the smear worked long enough for the consultants to cash their paychecks, and everything died down once the money stopped coming in?
Honestly, I think at least a part of the solution is consumers paying for stuff again. The Internet tried to give us everything for free for 20 years there, and we ended up getting what we paid for. At the end of the day, 10 bucks out of my pocket into a creator's is a pretty good and easily measureable metric.
Maybe the whole smear campaign and lawsuit were just the 2D chess part. The NYT expose was the 3D chess part. And 4D chess is getting the media to cover a supposed controversy so that people talk about you (Lively), make you a household name (Baldoni), and find out about your movie (It Ends With Us). I just learned this movie was based on a book and the plot sounds like a Nicholas Sparks story. So it seems like a coup that it made money ($50M on a $25M budget as you say). Part of that has to be the 2-for-1 savings of having the director be the male lead.
To quote the bard, "Shit's all fucked, dude."
This seems to apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law,
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
I read the NYT article when it dropped, and my conclusion was the same: I will no longer trust anything that's trending online. However, hearing how many times it was reposted from different devices using just one email is facinating insight into how these PR firms pull this off. You can emulate computers and android phones easily and you can automate much of this. So while it technically might not be a bot posting all of this, one person could easily automate the creation of scores of virtual machines and virtual androids from different IP addresses to post the same content many times on a bunch of different social media sites in a very short amount of time.
I hope this article takes off, Vince, as you are the first content provider I've seen post about this with strong evidence that your content was used in the campaign.
This was an interesting look into a world I do not give a fiddler's fuck about.
The whole thing reminds me of the end of Burn After Reading.
What did we learn, Palmer?
Put 'em all on the next flight to Venezuela
Avenue 'Ben Houdaifa' is a road 0.21 km in length in Tanger-Tétouan, Morocco and 'ben' means 'son of' in arabic. Naturally this means the avenue in Morocco really liked your article and kept reading it hundreds of times a day.
My guard always goes up when "celebrity was rude in an interview/talking to a fan" is used as damning evidence - unless it's a pattern of behavior (J. LO), 99 times out of 100, the interviewer/fan was being rude or asking a stupid question.
I wound up watching It Ends With Us the day after Christmas, with subtitles, on my mother's slightly-motion-smoothed TV. I didn't hate it! An extremely 2024 movie in its aesthetics and song choices.
I know defending J. Lo on the internet is a fool's game, but I find a lot of the negative reports around her to be a bit suss (like the alleged lousy tipping stuff), and evidence of her actual crimes are always like, "she made a dodgy movie and had a tour bomb during a historically terrible year for touring music acts", compared to, say, male actors who have admitted drunken sexual harrassment (Affleck), have credible assault allegations (Depp), or were caught on camera verbally abusing someone for daring to walk in their sight line (Bale).
Basically I think her biggest crime appears to be taking herself very seriously, a la Streisand, and I love her whole camp AF shtick.
JLo is the real celebrity personality story of this year. To the Tastefully-Discerning-of-the-Chronically-Online (me), Blake Lively being snippy a few times took a backseat to JLo betting on herself to the tune of like $50 mil for the multimedia rollout of a new album for it to flop so hard it required armchair psychology
AND she found time in between the cancelled tour and the divorce and the Amazon docs to make Atlas, a Netflix movie I know I watched, but could not tell you a thing about (Simu Liu and Sterling K. Brown were in it?) What a year!
A lot of prominent or semi-prominent people online spend an extreme amount of time hand-wringing about their numbers or how their engagement works on each platform and it's pretty tedious. But this was actually interesting! Another worthwhile chapter for your book about the modern media landscape.
For what it's worth, I do feel like Twitter and Tiktok did turn on Blake Lively for a few months, but it all reset pretty quicky because that Justin Baldoni guy never shut the hell up. Guess the smear worked long enough for the consultants to cash their paychecks, and everything died down once the money stopped coming in?
Honestly, I think at least a part of the solution is consumers paying for stuff again. The Internet tried to give us everything for free for 20 years there, and we ended up getting what we paid for. At the end of the day, 10 bucks out of my pocket into a creator's is a pretty good and easily measureable metric.
Maybe the whole smear campaign and lawsuit were just the 2D chess part. The NYT expose was the 3D chess part. And 4D chess is getting the media to cover a supposed controversy so that people talk about you (Lively), make you a household name (Baldoni), and find out about your movie (It Ends With Us). I just learned this movie was based on a book and the plot sounds like a Nicholas Sparks story. So it seems like a coup that it made money ($50M on a $25M budget as you say). Part of that has to be the 2-for-1 savings of having the director be the male lead.